Interview with Poet Barbara Crooker
Dale Trumbore: Barbara, it's just a joy to have worked with you for 15 years now. How does it feel to have your poetry set to music?
Barbara Crooker: The word that I'm thinking of is “weird.” It doesn't seem like I wrote the pieces anymore. It becomes somebody else's, and that's okay. I did have a moment during [the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s performance of] How to Go On where I found myself in tears over my own work because I was listening to it with very fresh ears, as if someone else had written it—at that kind of removal and distance. And then I thought, this is weird, crying over your own work.
I think if I were on purpose writing lyrics for music, that would feel different. But what this feels [like] to me is as if we collaborate. You take my words, and they allow you to do something musically that you want to do, and I'm happy that it works that way.
Dale Trumbore: Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to music? I know you love listening to music, but you don't consider yourself a singer or a musician in any way.
Barbara Crooker: I am cursed by the ability to know all the lyrics from all sorts of songs or all the verses to hymns, but I can't carry a tune at all. So I gain a lot of particularly meditative and spiritual things out of listening to music, but I come as a tabula rasa with no knowledge and no critical acumen whatsoever. I just let it wash over me and go with it as on a journey.
Dale Trumbore: I always say it’s just as important to have people listening to the music. Otherwise, what composers do is for nothing.
Barbara Crooker: And the same thing with poetry. If we had no audience for poetry, then what are we doing? Walt Whitman said something like either great poetry or great literature needs a great audience for it to exist. [Link] There's a dialogue and a relationship, and I very much like that.
Dale Trumbore: I do think there's a lot of lyricism in your work. Your work lends itself really easily to musical settings. How much do you think about the rhythm?
Barbara Crooker: I think a great deal about it. And that's actually an interesting thing for me, to see what you and other composers do when you set it, because the rhythm completely alters. While I'm really careful about how I break lines and what kind of rhythm I'm going for, you're working to a totally different purpose, and that's also fine.
I have two threads going in my work, I think: the lyrical, the nature poetry, but then also the narrative. And I think the narratives maybe don't lend themselves as well to being set to music. Maybe they seem more personal. But then here I find myself as a lyric poet: a poet that really responds to nature at a time when we may be seeing the death of nature. You know, pure poetry doesn't exist. We have to exist in the real world. And in the real world, terrible things are happening to our planet. So that's a real struggle and dichotomy that I'm always having to deal with.
Dale Trumbore: Seeing that across so many of your poems, that tension, that admiration for the natural world—and then also the poems that are more like memoir, the poems that are drawing from your own experiences, and the overlap between the two threads—I think that's sort of the sweet spot in which A Calendar of Light exists.
Barbara Crooker: It's an interesting thing, because you talked about memoir, which—sure, some of my work is personal and has that aspect, yet it's never exactly memoir. If I were doing memoir, I would be trying to be more accurate in terms of biographical details, whereas I'm starting with some of those things, but I'm manipulating them for image, rhythm, music—the service of the poem, rather than reporting.
Dale Trumbore: How do you reckon with your love of the natural world and everything that's going on now? There are lines in A Calendar of Light like “the only thing I know how to do is tend my garden,” and the line about writing poems: “they might become something that will burst into flame.” I think is my interpretation of that is: We fight back with what we have, whether that's planting our garden or using your skills as a writer to write these words that will burst into flame.
Barbara Crooker: The only thing we can do is be in the microcosm and do things in our own life, in our own world. I have to hope the ship will right itself, but I'm afraid it's going to take a long time. So, you know, all I can control is what I write and who I vote for and how I am in the world. I have to think that art, music, and poetry is that statement. Frost said it was a momentary stay against confusion. But yeah, we are the tiny sparks of light in a very dark world right now.
Dale Trumbore: It's a horrible situation, but I think finding poems that echo back to us how we're feeling is so important. It's almost like when you're ill and you get a diagnosis and you know, “Okay, I'm still sick, but at least I know what I have.” Maybe that's a flawed metaphor, but kind of how I feel reading your poetry that speaks exactly to a feeling that I've had, particularly ones of frustration or of great beauty, or an appreciation that I don't necessarily know how to put into words.
Barbara Crooker: You know, after 9/11, people started talking on the Internet about what the purpose of poetry was in a time like that. And it seemed like most people agreed it was either to give collective voice to our grief and fears, or to express moments of joy, because that's when we turn to poetry: weddings, funerals, or national mourning.
Dale Trumbore: I'm curious, do you have any advice for artists? You've been so prolific. I'm in awe of not just how much art you've created, but how much wonderful writing you've created. You have all these other responsibilities in your life, and you've still managed to create so much wonderful art.
Barbara Crooker: Without art in my life, would I have kept going? You know, that's really a big question. What you see is just the tip of the giant iceberg of rejection that's underneath it. It's a hard part of the writing life because, especially writing poetry, you've got so many pieces that are out at one time, and you're dealing with a constant barrage of rejection. Some days I deal with it; I shrug it off. Other days, it really sends me into a downward spiral, like: “Do I really need to do this to myself anymore? Look how old I am.” But we all deal with this, and I don't think there's any necessarily easy way of being a working writer.
One of the things that's helped me along the way is likening the whole submission process to a really bizarre game of badminton. So when things come back, the cure for that is you whack your racket and send them back out again.
Dale Trumbore: When I talk to singers who have sung my music that sets your work, people have a specific image that sticks in their mind. I can't tell you how often someone comes up and is like, “We sang In the Middle in my chorus, and now I think of it every time I make soup, or every time I make bread, or every time my dog stands between me and my partner.” These images stick with people. When you're writing a poem, do you ever think, “I've done it! This is the image that is really going to resonate with people”? Or is it more like you're going for the gestalt, the whole poem?
Barbara Crooker: Maybe sometimes on the 25th or 50th draft, I'll find that image that makes the whole thing come alive. But it takes a lot of really bad writing to get to those. And a lot of it happens in the editing process, where I'm suddenly seeing a thread of either imagery or language that connects. And then I think, “Okay, so this is the part that should be burnished, and these other parts should either fall away or end up on the cutting room floor.”
What you don't see, of course, is the work that I just don't even send out in the world. For every poem that seems to live and breathe and get up on its feet and want to dance, they're the ones that are DOA. Sometimes I cannibalize them. Sometimes I cut out just the few images or lines that I think are working, and I try to start something new from them.
Dale Trumbore: I know your new manuscript addresses grief very directly, but that's [present] in so many of your poems and something I'm drawn to. Even if it's not a circumstance that I can relate directly to, the grief itself is so universal, and how you describe it taps into something really powerful and really visceral, too.
I'm thinking of the line in How to Go On, in Requiescat: “I am here by the phone, waiting for the call.” I lost a friend last year, and I can't tell you how many times that that line made it into my head. It's such a simple line, but I think anyone who lives long enough will have that experience. How do you look unflinchingly at grief? I'm sure it's not always unflinching, but your way of addressing death and grief is so honest. How do you cultivate the resilience needed to address that topic so honestly?
Barbara Crooker: I think of the poet Adrienne Rich, who had a wonderful seminal book called Diving into the Wreck. I think the grief books also say this: “There's no way out but through.” You have to go as deep as you can and not try to candy-coat or soft-pedal or any of that.
One of the things about my going through the grieving experience, losing my spouse, was how much I started to recognize: This is the human experience. Nobody gets out of this without going through this. We lose our parents, I lost a child, we lose our friends. It's one of the awful parts of aging that nobody wants to talk about. But the older you get, the more friends you lose.
We’re brought up to think about love stories. We're brought up with Disney: “You meet your prince and you live happily ever after.” There isn’t any [happily ever after]. It's an awful thing if you spend a lot of time with it, yet you can't pretend that it doesn't exist.
Dale Trumbore: I think you have a meditation practice—is that correct?
Barbara Crooker: Part of my practice is walking. To me, walking is a huge meditative thing, and it's something I'm trying to bring to living here in a retirement community. I’m trying to bring things I learned from being at an artist colony, which are: You go to your desk, you work really hard, and then you go and take a walk. Not thinking about things as you're walking helps your unconscious really filter things and bubble things and come back to your desk ready to go. You're fresh again.
Dale Trumbore: I have one more question for you, but before we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to share based on what we've been talking about, or just based on the idea of collaboration?
Barbara Crooker: Well, I want to say what a pleasure and a privilege it has been for me to work with you, and then have my work reach an entirely different type of audience than it ever would reach otherwise. I mean, A Calendar of Light, the audience that we had those two nights—that was amazing. Poetry, unfortunately, is a niche in our society. All of these little journals, or even the internet journals, which are more reachable—it’s a very small audience, and this [collaboration] expands it to another audience. I'm very grateful for that. And I also have a gratitude practice that I do every day, and I will put you in my gratitude practice tomorrow. That's kind of how I start my day.
Dale Trumbore: Oh, that’s beautiful. My last question is about something that I noticed in your work—I think I first noticed it in Light of late November. You tend to list plants in your poems in groups of three.
Barbara Crooker: Do you know why that is? I can tell you exactly why that is. That's a gardening principle, to plant things in groups of three. But I don't think I noticed that I did that in my work, so, wow.
Dale Trumbore: It's like the poem itself is transformed into a garden. I just love that.
Barbara Crooker: I like that, too. You know, in some of my poems, I talk about returning to my garden. [Now that] I'm here in an apartment, I’ve given up my garden. But this complex is in a 63-acre arboretum, and I now find myself on the arboretum board. So I'm going to be planting—metaphorically, but also helping to fundraise—with giant things, with trees. How exciting is that?
Dale Trumbore: That makes me so happy—the idea that you're going from little lettuces and all the things that you’ve mentioned in your poems to these giant trees.
Barbara Crooker: You know, I'm new on the board, but it's one of their overriding concerns to select new trees to plant that are the ones that capture carbon dioxide the most. I think of the poem that I'm pretty sure is W.S. Merwin, [where] the world is ending, and that person would still be planting a tree. [Link to Place] So yes, we should all be planting trees. I read somewhere that every person should be planting at least three trees in their lifetime, which I've already done, but I'll plant some more.
Dale Trumbore: That feels like a good note to end on, the idea of planting, unless you want to add anything else.
Barbara Crooker: Art, beauty, poetry, music. These are the places we need to be going. So thank you for what you've been, what you have brought into this world. Think about it: It's all magical, right? It all came from our heads.
Dale Trumbore: I know. It's wild, when you think about it that way. I get sort of stuck in the practical side of things where it's like, “No, I go to my piano and I sit down and I do my work.” But when you view it as magic…
Barbara Crooker: Let it continue.
